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July 2025 Vol. 62 No. 11

In Empires in Friction, Hanna (American Univ. in Cairo, Egypt) offers a compellingly revised history of Ottoman Egypt’s transformation from a turbulent, newly conquered, formerly Mamluk territory in 1517 to a bureaucratically regulated, financially productive Ottoman province in the last decades of the 16th century. Written from the perspective of formerly Mamluk clerks, jurists, peasants, philosophers, poets, merchants, and dignitaries who observed and participated in the expansion and reinvention of the Ottoman polity post-conquest, the book challenges scholarly assumptions common to both local histories of early modern Egypt and general histories of the Ottoman Empire broadly defined. Most notably, Hanna upsets decades of conventional wisdom, positing 16th-century Ottoman governance as a centralized, centralizing, or even “absolutist” endeavor. Indeed, by couching the study within an ambitious world-historical framework—comparing, for example, Mexico City and Cairo as simultaneously local, imperial, and global trade hubs—she productively reimagines not only the contours of West Asian or North African imperial rule but the broader meaning of “empire” on a trans-regional scale. Students and specialists will find this book accessible, as the argument is painstakingly outlined throughout. However, if assigned in an undergraduate Ottoman history course, instructors may find it useful to address its non-standard system of transliteration.

--R. A. Miller, emerita, University of Massachusetts Boston

Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.